1 Introduction

Discussed the importance of corporate apology letters in public crises and pointed out their role in maintaining corporate reputation and rebuilding stakeholder relationships. Emphasis was placed on the positive impact of a proper apology on alleviating negative public opinion and stock prices. Existing research often analyzes apology speech acts from the perspectives of evaluative language, pragmatic strategies, or step structures, lacking a systematic analysis of the lexical and grammatical implementation of apology speech acts. Local grammar provides a new analytical approach that emphasizes the grammatical form of speech acts and the expression strategies and structural features in specific contexts. Existing research has applied local grammar to the examination of apologies in academic discourse and everyday English speaking. However, in the specific business context of corporate apology letters, apology expression is a strategic written expression that has undergone organizational, rhetorical, and legal considerations. Therefore, a systematic study of the partial grammar of apologies in corporate apology letters is particularly necessary. This article adopts a corpus driven approach to construct the apology partial grammar of English corporate apology letters, explore the lexical and grammatical forms of corporate apology speech acts, expand the application scope of partial grammar in business discourse, and deepen the understanding of corporate apology discourse communication, providing theoretical support and practical guidance for business crisis communication, corporate communication training, and specialized English teaching.

2 Local Grammar: Theoretical Development and Research Status

The theory of local grammar originated from the study of restricted languages and sub languages, focusing on the systematic and typological description of specific speech acts in language expression. Unlike traditional grammar, local grammar focuses on context sensitive "form function" mapping, suitable for detailed description of speech acts such as evaluation, definition, and exemption. Under the framework of the New Firth School, local grammar emphasizes the manifestation of functional units in lexical grammar, promoting the integration of pragmatic functions and lexical syntax. In recent years, local grammar has been widely applied in the field of specialized English, especially in the study of describing specific discourse functions in academic discourse. Research often focuses on summarizing high-frequency patterns from expert and academic novice corpora, and exploring their functional differences, providing empirical support for academic writing teaching. However, research on local grammar in professional discourse, especially in business contexts, is still in its early stages. In the study of corporate discourse, local grammar methods provide effective tools for exploring functions such as crisis communication, declarative texts, and emotional regulation. Previous studies have examined the expression of disclaimers in corporate annual reports, the forms of expression of changes in financial texts, and the language structure of commitments in crisis statements. In addition, a small amount of research has also focused on the grammatical forms of specific texts such as return statements and shareholder letters, but most of them remain at the modeling of a certain discourse behavior, lacking systematic comparison or longitudinal tracking. In terms of apology behavior research, a set of apology partial grammar forms applicable to daily contexts has been proposed, and its applicability has been further verified through multilingual and multi language research. Although local grammar has demonstrated strong analytical power in various discourses, as a highly institutionalized and rhetorical genre, the local grammar features expressed in corporate apology letters have not yet received systematic attention. Given that corporate apologies have multiple legal, reputational, and emotional functions, their language usage may differ significantly from everyday speech or academic texts. This article takes apology letters from English companies as the research object, combined with a partial grammar analysis path, aiming to identify the lexical and grammatical forms of high-frequency apology expressions, reveal how companies achieve the triple goals of responsibility, strategy avoidance, and public repair through language in crisis communication, and expand the research boundary of local grammar in specialized English discourse.

3 Research Design

This chapter introduces the design of a study on the partial grammar of apologies in English corporate apology letters. Research on self built corpus, using local grammar path to identify instances of apology speech acts in corporate apology letters, construct local grammar of apologies in business context, and describe the meaning generation mechanism from three levels: semantics, morphology, and discourse function. The study answered the high-frequency apology partial grammar forms and their variants in corporate apology letters, as well as how business context affects the partial grammar forms and vocabulary grammar choices of apologies. The corpus comes from 102 English apology letters published by the top 300 companies in the Fortune 500 from 2016 to 2023, totaling 25436 words. The research steps include: 1) starting from normalized expression, searching and identifying instances of speech acts; 2) Manually check the retrieved language instances to ensure they have extra linguistic power; 3) Determine the standard for standardizing apology forms and identify all apology expressions in the corpus; 4) Use AntConc to index and manually check apology expressions in the corpus; 5) Based on previous research, 8 functional categories were used for analysis, and the functional categories were matched with the vocabulary grammar implementation form to construct the apology partial grammar in the enterprise apology letter.

4 Results and Discussion

Through the analysis of 153 examples of apology speech acts, 14 partial grammar forms in English corporate apology letters were revealed, mainly divided into 6 sets of canonical forms. Among them, Type 3 (apologist+hinge+apology+reason details) and Type 4 (apologist+apology+reason details) are the most common types of apologies, indicating that companies tend to clarify the reasons for apologies to demonstrate a positive response attitude. In contrast, more common colloquial expressions in daily conversations, such as I'm sorry, are less commonly used in business contexts, and companies prefer formal apology expressions to demonstrate professionalism. In addition, companies rarely directly indicate the target audience in apology letters, but instead use other means to indicate the intended audience. Overall, the partial grammar patterns in corporate apology letters reflect the strategy of clearly expressing apologies and seeking acceptance of apologies, in order to adapt to the characteristics of the business context.

5 Conclusion

Explored the partial grammatical features in corporate apology letters, revealing their programmatic expression and restricted language characteristics. Based on 8 functional categories, the study summarized 6 sets of local linguistic code patterns, of which two patterns accounted for 68% of apology language examples. These forms are not common in daily conversations, demonstrating the practicality of local grammar paths in explaining speech acts in business contexts. The vocabulary and grammar patterns of corporate apology letters reflect three core characteristics: emphasis on transparency and responsibility, restraint of emotional expression, and depersonalization of expression. These findings reveal the influence of domain and genre on the local grammatical construction of speech acts, deepen the understanding of apology strategies in enterprises, and provide guidance for crisis communication practices in enterprises. The research is limited by the size of the corpus, and further research can explore the form preferences and specific reasons for the partial grammar of apologies in different industries.